It hadn’t been the kind of thing she could have explained to anyone, she told me. In so many ways, she knew that she and Ezra had been lucky to have found each other. To enjoy each other as much as they did. Lucky to have found certain quiet rhythms of life, of closeness, that had sustained them. Anything she might have said about it to anyone else would have sounded ungrateful. Would have sounded like complaining, she’d thought, to friends who’d gone through rough breakups, or been treated badly, who’d had their hearts broken, or were alone because they couldn’t find anyone.

Then one day they went to see a movie. It was in French, she said, and in some ways you could say that it was a very simple story. A story about the private life of an old couple, retired music teachers, who have been happy together for a very long time. They go to a concert, and the next morning, while they are eating breakfast in the kitchen in their robes, the wife suffers her first stroke. And from then on, the film remains there in those rooms of their conjoined inner life, trying to work out what happens when there is a couple who have been together for a lifetime, and one of them suddenly becomes an invalid. When it’s up to the other to figure out how to care for her, to help her to live with the least amount of suffering and indignity.

Sophie had sat in the dark theater watching the face of the elderly husband, she told me. Watching his expression as he cared for his wife with such patience, such tenderness and loyalty. His wife had made him promise not to send her back to the hospital ever again, and he wouldn’t break that promise, no matter what strain it put on him. He isn’t a saint. He loses his temper, and once he even slaps his wife out of frustration that she refuses to eat or drink, that he is alone in trying to keep her alive. But never once does he fail to try, fail to care. It’s continuous with who he has been to her, and what she has been to him, for more than fifty years. Though the fact that it’s intuitive, an expression of his nature, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t tax him or require enormous effort.